1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a wireless communication method, wireless communication apparatus, and wireless communication system in which a plurality of wireless communication apparatuses perform high-throughput wireless communication while sharing a plurality of different frequency channels.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been proposed a wireless communication system in which a plurality of wireless communication apparatuses perform high-throughput wireless communication while sharing a plurality of different frequency channels (see Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 2004-23143). In a conventional wireless communication system of this type, a base station serves as an entity to control frame exchange in all frequency channels. In addition, wireless communication to be performed in all frequency channels is limited to that between the base station and the mobile stations.
When the base station is to serve as an entity to control frame exchange in all frequency channels, the control in the base station obviously becomes complicated. When data is to be transmitted from a given mobile station to another mobile station, the data from the transmission source mobile station is transmitted first to the base station. The base station then transmits the data from the transmission source mobile station to the destination mobile station. That is, data to be transmitted from a mobile station to another mobile station always passes through the base station. In this case, the overall data transmission efficiency of the system is not necessarily good.